On the banks of the Yukon River, after arriving by canoe only a few miles from the Canadian border, I shared some salmon with Karma Ulvi, the chief of the Native Village of Eagle in Alaska. But the fish we ate wasn’t caught locally: A plane had delivered the salmon from Bristol Bay, in the southwest corner of the state, over 1,000 miles away. For the Native tribes that have lived along the Yukon for millennia, importing is the only option. “We haven’t been able to fish for seven years,” said Ulvi.
In the last stronghold for wild salmon on earth, these tribes are fighting to save the fish. But it’s a war with many fronts, none of them simple: climate change, federal funding, competing scientific narratives, and, ultimately, corporate greed. Heat stroke during the summer has left scores of dead fish on the banks, unable to reach their spawning grounds. And over the last few decades, Alaska has seen more rain in the fall, causing floods that wash out salmon eggs. “They’re not managing for sustainability,” said Ulvi of fisheries management that allows billions of dollars of commercial fishing to take place while Native villages face malnutrition. “They’re managing for maximum profit.”
At the village’s first “culture camp,” attendees cleaned and processed fish while speaking their own language—a rare dialect of Hän Athabascan—and practiced traditional dances. First Nation tribes in Canada have been doing these camps for years, as have some Alaska villages on the Yukon, creating a place for Indigenous practices to be taught and applied.